Podcast Survivor: The business of podcasting is the future of podcasting

Podcasting is a fertile new landscape in radio and audio media, which is why we’ve covered it here at Radio Survivor. Starting with this post we’re stepping up our coverage. I’ll be writing about podcasting every Wednesday for our new Podcast Survivor feature. Lucky for me, this first week the web has already been pretty full of writing and reflecting about podcasting.

App developer and blogger Allen Pike published a piece on Monday charting the Fall and Rise of Podcasting. He observes that the fall coincided with the end of Odeo in 2007. Odeo was a web podcasting platform that just happened to be the first product created by the team that went on to make a little thing called Twitter.

Pike says the subsequent rise was sparked as tech podcasters “like Dan Benjamin, John Gruber, and Merlin Mann were bailing in,” while at the same time “the startup echo-chamber was bailing out of the podcast world.” The rise was aided, he argues, by the influx of advertising money from forward-looking companies like web host Squarespace and domain registrar Hover.

With the proliferation of well-produced podcasts and revived popular attention to the form, there is still a marked lack of coverage and analysis of podcasting, as a medium and, crucially, as a business. Even though I think radio is woefully under-covered these days, there are nevertheless a handful of industry publications and websites dedicated to it. By comparison, there’s just a little bit of coverage of podcasting personalities and a weekly podcast about podcasting, but otherwise next to no regular reporting on the business of podcasting.

I don’t know how I missed this story when it first published, but I’m glad I found it and Wolf’s own podcast. This article is the best report on the business and organizational side of podcasting I’ve encountered. More importantly, I was excited to learn that because his interview recordings have been so popular, Wolf has continued to interview podcast folks for what he calls the Podcast Project.

To get the overview listen to Wolf’s “Podumentary” that he produced as a companion to the Forbes article. Just after reviewing the “Podumentary” I then listened to the interviews with Glass, SoundCloud content manager Jim Colgan and Dan Benjamin from the 5by5 podcast network, only stopping so I could finish working on this post. (Believe me, I’ll be diving back in as soon as I can.)

This sort of reporting and documenting is critical if podcasting is going to mature as a medium. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, podcasters gotta eat, and that only becomes more likely when podcasting is taken as seriously as Pandora, Spotify and old fashioned radio. I hope to contribute to this effort.

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About Paul Riismandel

Paul Riismandel is co-founder and operations director of Radio Survivor. He is also the podcasting evangelist for Midroll Media, serving as producer for The Wolf Den podcast. Paul has more than 20 years of experience in non-commercial radio and instructional media. He is a contributing editor for Streaming Media Magazine, covering the education beat.

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